About

As two of today's most renowned dancers/choreographers, French West Africa's Koffi Kôkô and Brazil's Ismael Ivo join Ziya Azazi--a Turkish master of the whirling dervish tradition--and Japanese director Yoshi Oida to form a multicultural team of dance/theater visionaries. Together, they've created a riveting re-imagining of The Maids, French playwright Jean Genet's gender-bending classic about two servants and their wealthy mistress.

In Saint Genet l'Africain, Kôkô and Ivo portray prison inmates who act out their deepest fantasies in separate cells. Under the watchful eye of an eccentric warden, played by Azazi, their stylized game of dominance and submission soon turns deadly. A longtime collaborator with experimental theater genius Peter Brook, Oida draws upon tribal rituals and Asian aesthetics--also found in Martha Graham's dance-making--to explore concepts of eroticism and confinement. The fluctuations of mood, from delight to revulsion to horror, are accentuated by Brazilian artist João de Bruço, who performs his entrancing, percussive score with other musicians onstage.

"Conviction and intensity… a gripping performance"--London's The Independent